Badung's 2026 wage floor is IDR 3,791,002.57. A privately hired villa housekeeper has no floor at all

Ask what a villa owner on Bali must pay the staff who run the house, and the answer comes back as a single number. In eleven discussions we logged this year, owners asking that question were told to pay the minimum wage, around 3.6 million rupiah a month, as though the floor were the going rate.Estimate Two documents decide the answer. Neither contains that figure, and they do not describe the same obligation.

The first is a gubernatorial decree setting Bali’s wage floors for 2026. The second is a law that did not exist when most of those conversations happened. Between them they produce a result few owners would predict: the house with paying guests in it sits under a wage floor whose breach is a crime, and the house without them sits under whatever the owner and the worker agreed, in a conversation nothing obliges anyone to write down.

What does Badung’s minimum wage actually bind?

The regency minimum wage for Badung in 2026 is IDR 3,791,002.57 a month, in force from 1 January 2026 under Keputusan Gubernur Bali 1021/03-M/HK/2025 of 23 December 2025.^{Source: 1}Dinas Tenaga Kerja dan ESDM Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified Badung matters because Canggu, Seminyak and Jimbaran sit inside it. Ubud does not: it is in Gianyar, and Gianyar is a different number.

There is a higher number for Badung, and it does not apply to a villa. The sectoral regency figure is IDR 3,828,912.60, but the decree restricts it to accommodation and food service under KBLI 2020 letter I, and within that only to four and five-star hotels.^{Source: 1}Dinas Tenaga Kerja dan ESDM Provinsi Bali, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified A villa is not a star-rated hotel, so the sectoral figure is not a villa’s number even in Badung.

Now the part that decides everything else. Indonesia’s labour law defines a perusahaan as a form of business undertaking that employs workers for wages, and a pengusaha as the person who runs one; a pemberi kerja, by contrast, is any individual who employs someone for wages.^{Source: 5}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified The prohibition on underpaying is written against the second category and not the third: a pengusaha may not pay wages below the minimum wage.^{Source: 6}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified Breaching it is a criminal offence carrying one to four years of imprisonment and a fine of IDR 100,000,000 to IDR 400,000,000.^{Source: 6}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

A private household is a pemberi kerja. It is not a pengusaha, and a house is not a business undertaking. The floor, and the prison term behind it, do not reach it.

What does the new domestic workers law require?

On 30 April 2026 Indonesia promulgated UU 2/2026 on the protection of domestic workers, and it entered into force the same day.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified It is the first statute to address the arrangement directly, and it defines the employer as one or more people in a household who employ a domestic worker for wages.

Its definition of domestic work is a list: cooking, laundry and ironing, cleaning the house, cleaning the yard and garden, minding children, caring for the sick, the elderly and people with disabilities, driving, guarding the house, caring for pets, and anything else the two sides agree is domestic work.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified Read that list next to a staffed villa and the overlap is near total. The law also requires a domestic worker to be at least 18, to hold an electronic identity card and to produce a health certificate.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

On the holiday allowance, the law is both clearer and emptier than owners expect. A domestic worker has the right to a religious holiday allowance, in money, and the wage and the allowance are given in the amount and at the time that the parties have agreed.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified There is no month of wages, no proportional formula and no seven-day deadline. The amount is deferred to a government regulation, and every implementing regulation under this law is due within one year of its entry into force — by 30 April 2027.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified That regulation has not been issued.

The law forbids a placement company from placing a domestic worker with anything other than an individual employer, and it attaches administrative sanctions to those companies alone.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified No sanction in the statute points at the household that does not pay. What a worker gets instead is a dispute route: mediation by the head of the neighbourhood association where they work, then a labour mediator who must decide within seven days, with a decision on wages final and binding.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

Which regime does a villa fall under?

The statutory test is not where the work happens. It is whether there is a business undertaking. A villa let to paying guests is one; a residence is not. Two people doing the same work with the same broom therefore fall under different law depending on who sleeps in the room.

The left column is the 2016 ministerial regulation on the religious holiday allowance, and it is worth reading closely because owners who have heard of any rule have heard of this one. It governs the allowance for workers in a company, and the obligation attaches after one month of continuous work — not one year.^{Source: 4}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified The amount is one month of wages once twelve months are served, and below that it is the months served divided by twelve.^{Source: 4}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

Payment is tied to each worker’s own religious holiday unless the work agreement, company rules or a collective agreement say otherwise, and it must arrive no later than seven days before.^{Source: 4}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified For a Hindu worker the regulation names that holiday as Nyepi^{Source: 4}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified — which on Bali points at a different date from the one an owner reading about Indonesian holiday pay will have in mind. Pay late and the fine is 5 per cent of the amount owed, and paying the fine does not discharge the allowance.^{Source: 4}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

One caution about that regulation: it was issued to implement a provision of PP 78/2015 on wages, a later wage regulation now occupies the same ground, and the ministry’s own register nonetheless still records the 2016 instrument as in force.^{Source: 4}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified We have not found an instrument that repeals it.

What do the contributions cost, and who pays?

For a domestic worker, UU 2/2026 routes both contributions through the agreement rather than through a rate. Health cover is a state subsidy in the first place, and only where the worker is not a subsidy recipient does it fall on the employer, by agreement and witnessed by the neighbourhood head. Employment cover falls on the employer too — but, in the same article’s words, in accordance with the Agreement or the Work Contract. The explanatory memorandum fixes that cover at a minimum of work accident and death benefit.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified Both halves land where the wage landed: the statute names the obligation and leaves its size to the two people who agreed it.

Those two are priced in a government regulation, and the price turns on a condition we nearly printed past. The familiar figures — work accident cover from 0.10 per cent of monthly wages at the lowest risk class to 1.60 per cent at the highest, death benefit cover at 0.20 per cent — are the rates after a slice was moved to the job-loss programme, and the next paragraph of each article confines them to a wage-earning participant who is required to be, and already is, registered in that programme. For a participant who is not registered, the regulation says in terms that the rates are not recomposed and the earlier ones stay in force.^{Source: 7}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

The condition bites hardest here of anywhere, because this piece’s whole argument is that a household is not a company. A worker hired directly by a household is among the least likely people on the island to sit inside a job-loss programme, so the rates a reader would reach for are probably not the rates that apply. The un-recomposed figures sit in the 2015 regulation this one amends, and we could not read them: the ministry’s register carries a record for that regulation with no document file attached to it.^{Source: 10}Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, JDIH, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Unverified We are not going to print a cost we could not price. The same regulation already names a worker employed by an individual person as a wage-earning participant in both programmes, which is a useful signal: Indonesian social security law has contemplated the household employer for years, even where wage law did not.^{Source: 7}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

Health insurance is where we have to stop short. The split for a wage-earning worker is widely reported as 5 per cent of monthly wages, four points from the employer and one from the worker, but we could not open the presidential regulation that states it.Unverified The national legal database answered 403 to every request on 05.10.2026 and no other government portal we could reach serves the text. We print the figure as unverified rather than leave the question out, and we will replace it when the document opens.

Where this reading could be wrong

The decree at the centre of this piece is a scanned image. What we read is the provincial labour office’s own announcement, which quotes the decree by number and date and prints every figure; pages three to six of that file, which carry the decree itself, have no text layer. If the announcement misquotes its own decree, we repeat the error.

The same is true one level up. The Indonesian text of the 2016 regulation on holiday pay is a scan; we read the ministry’s own English translation, published on the same register page, and a translation is a translation. The 2021 wage regulation that replaced the rule the 2016 instrument was written to implement is published as a scan whose body pages carry no text layer at all^{Source: 8}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified, so we say nothing here about what it provides on holiday pay. And of the 2015 ministerial regulation on domestic workers, which the new law keeps alive so far as it is not contrary, the register publishes a one-page abstract — its masthead gives the regulation itself as eight pages.^{Source: 9}JDIH Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan, Last reviewed 05/10/2026Confidence: Verified

The line we have drawn between a business and a residence is ours, read off the statutory definitions. It is not a decided case. We found no decision applying the 2026 law to a short-let villa, which is unsurprising: the law is five months old. The hardest version of the question is the one neither document answers — the housekeeper who cleans for guests three days a week and for the owner’s family on the other four. Our reading says the guest days make a business of the house. We cannot show you a document that says so, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Finally, the whole second half of this piece has a known expiry. If the government regulation promised under Pasal 15 sets a floor, a formula or a deadline for domestic workers, it will date everything above on the day it is promulgated. We will update this page when it appears, and if the regulation contradicts our reading we will say so in the corrections log rather than quietly edit the text.